A.R. Knight's Blog, page 13

Rakers Week 2 – Fade Out

Bond. Bourne. That guy from Kingsman. You know the type – the brutal, no-mercy man. It’s a compelling character type to write because they can convincingly do just about anything. Insane risks don’t take much consideration for these characters because they have so little to lose. If Bourne dies in a fire, who’s going to mourn? My guess is that funeral is pretty lonely.

Bond might have a few more – MI6 friends, perhaps. But family? Nah. That just brings complications.

With Rakers, though, Faden (Fade) Vance is someone different. Someone who can’t leave behind the shadier sides of life no matter how much he might want to because he’s got a daughter to raise. Tuition is expensive. Owning a house costs money. There’s no vast government sponsor with limitless resources fueling his ventures. But Fade isn’t a redux of Liam Neeson’s character in Taken  – this isn’t only about family, but rather how having a family impacts the choices you make every day. Only, rather than deciding what’s for dinner, Fade’s deciding which contract to take. It might be worth his while to take that lucrative deal for a kidnapping, but someone’s still got to pick up dinner for Jaycee. That risky encounter with a group of thugs could pay the mortgage, but can he disappear for another weeknight or take the chance of winding up dead, his daughter getting the worst phone call of her life in the middle of the night?

So Fade’s got problems.

He also has dreams. Ambitions beyond the next assignment. Yes, he wants Jaycee to be able to afford whatever school or career she wants. Yes, he wants to have a house. Yes, he wants to be able to get absurd amounts of gin even when happy hour’s over. But Fade also wants to see those moments. He wants to enjoy the house. He wants to see his daughter walk across that stage. He wants to sip mai tais on an island without worrying about a loaded gun pointed at the back of his head.

In a just world, those dreams would be his by now. Fade’s old enough, definitely. Made his share of sacrifices. He’s been good enough to stay alive this long, good enough to cultivate a list of clients willing to pay large amounts of dough for his services. By rights, Fade should be able to walk off the stage into a happy twilight.

Except the bills keep coming. Just because he’s lived out more than nine lives, doesn’t mean Fade gets a free pass on his tenth. So, in Rakers, Fade is still hustling. Still pulling contracts and taking the cash he can get. Hoping that he’s not going to wind up in over his own head.

Only, if Fade was being honest with himself, he could’ve retired. Could’ve shipped the two of them out to some small town and coasted. But he doesn’t. Hasn’t.

Because, not-so-deep-down, Fade knows he likes it. The thrill, the adventure, knowing that every second matters.

There’s more than one way to die, after all.

Rakers Week 1 – A Modern Setting

You might think that there’s something easy about choosing a “current day” setting. After all, it’s the world in which we live, right? If you, the writer, are in it every day, then naturally you know it, don’t you?

Rakers takes place right around now. Maybe a little bit in the future, but not far enough to have drastic changes (the vague date serves a story purpose – which is to remove real-life current events from the scope of the books). This gives the characters a lot of toys to place with – things like modern smartphones, cars and weapons. All sorts of fun. These, of course, are also things the reader will know about and have expectations for.

Ever watch a horror movie and laugh about how a cell phone would ruin the plot (or watch modern ones and shake your head at how they convolute things to make ever-present connections to the outside world go away – isolated cabins are so popular these days)? It’s the same thing with Rakers – these are “real” people who would react and communicate in real-time with one another. Every bit of information, including the locations of friends and family, is readily available and in their hands. Rather than run away from the complications this could introduce, in Rakers, those kinds of elements play a part in the story.

Take, for example, Jaycee. As Fade’s daughter and a sophomore in high school, she’s the sort of character that could get sidelined by other settings. Either not old enough to fight dragons or trained enough to pilot a starfighter, it’s a gray area reserved for stories where the kids are often exceptional (Hunger Games, Divergent, Harry Potter, etc.). In Rakers, though, Jaycee is able to both be herself and be effective simply because our current world gives a wealth of possibilities to people at almost any age. That Jaycee is able to have an impact is almost as surprising to her as it was to me when I was writing it up.

And that, I think, is one of the better gifts a setting can provide: agency for characters that might otherwise have none. Jaycee’s arc is driven, to a large degree, by the setting and the natural skills a person like her would have in our current environment.

So, while it can be easy to choose a fantastical setting for the benefits it offers (spells, light speed travel), I found that by putting Rakers right around today that there was so much to do, so many neat twists and turns that could come about thanks to the magic we live with every day. And even without lasers or giant swords, Rakers was still a blast to write.

Rakers is Launching

Yep – the title pretty much says it all on this one. Rakers, my next novel, is launching. It’ll be available in all the places in ebook and some of the places in print. I’ll have a link up for it shortly and all that jazz.

Rakers is about a pair of ex-special forces members who have turned to using their special set of skills in rough ways to make ends meet. We’re talking kidnappings, beatdowns-with-a-message, and various other illicit deeds. They command a good price.

However, Fade (that’s our hero) is interrupted during a routine kidnapping by a pair of odd-looking people who insist that he’s the biggest risk humanity’s got. As in, Fade is a direct arrow to the apocalypse, according to them. When Fade objects to this interpretation, things get messy and people get hurt.

Now Fade has to figure out how he became the target, and, more importantly, how to get these people, who have weapons and ways he’s never seen before, off his back. If he doesn’t, he won’t have long to live.

Rakers plays the action-adventure card to the fullest, while introducing a new universe and characters that will continue through more stories to come. If you’re interested in a fast-paced thrill with characters who are more than talking plot points, Rakers ought to be fun.

Plus, it contains tacos.

Cauliflower Rice and Experimental Cooking

If you handed me a bowl of cauliflower rice without telling me what it was, I’d probably guess some form of cheese. Goat cheese, or maybe a thick Parmesan. However, it lacks the flavor of those two delectable treats. Like normal rice, it takes on the taste of whatever you pair it with, acting as a base to ground in other foods.

Making cauliflower rice requires taking the cauliflower itself, chopping it up, throwing it in a food processor and whittling away at it till it’s been sliced into bits (though not pureed). There’s some science to this bit, science that I haven’t quite nailed down. I still find chunky parts in the end result, though I accept those as casualties and move on with the recipe because to do otherwise would lead to madness.

Then it’s the skillet and a dousing of oil, maybe some spices, and eventually water to simmer the stuff down. And at the end you’ve got a pile of white, sort of fluffy, stuff.

My wife is a culinary experimenter – one who adventures into new recipes with a sort of fearless abandon, like the Lewis and Clarke expedition, only instead of the Pacific Ocean, we’re venturing into new aisles of the grocery store. Then, if she’s busy, it falls to me to carry her grand plans to a delectable conclusion.

And I’ll say this – there’s all sorts of good things to be gained by venturing out into the culinary wilds. I’ve learned about more types of food, and how to prepare them, in the last few years than I had in the 25 years before. I’m more creative in the kitchen, now, on my own than I had been before her.

This, I think (and hope), has a positive effect on the ol’ writing life. Something about how exploring creativity in one field helps bring it into others.

If nothing else, at least, there’s still the cauliflower rice.

Donkey Kong Country – Where Setting Makes All the Difference

As a child of the 90s, the Super Nintendo played a distinct part in my elementary school life. There was Mario, sure, jumping along on mushrooms and pipes in worlds full of fireballs, turtles, and Bowser. But, when compared with the lush jungles, dark caves, and haunting seas of Donkey Kong, I couldn’t help but change favorites.

Donkey Kong also offered a true competitive mode, wherein each player progresses through their own game, trading off with the other, which made it a natural for a house full of brothers attempting to prove our button-mashing skills to one another.

Anyway, here you are. The player. Controlling a pair of apes (Donkey and Diddy, the younger, baseball-cap wearing one) in a quest to retrieve their stash of bananas on an island that somehow contains every climate zone and massive amounts of barrels (some of which, inexplicably, contain your allies when they’ve been lost).

The setting, taken at face value, offers no sense. You’ve got talking crocodiles, beavers that roll giant stone wheels, and clay creatures that stop and go according to mysterious barrels. Mine carts rocket through crumbling caverns. The monkeys can, apparently, hold their breath for great lengths of time to capture what would surely be rotting bananas at the bottom of various oceans.

However, and this is a lesson worth taking away – the ridiculousness of everything here is easily ignored because the gameplay, the core of the Donkey Kong experience, is so good. In fact, because you’re enjoying playing the game so much, you might find yourself lost in wonder at the world your charges inhabit.

This gets back to a core teaching of story-telling – that if you get the most important part right, people will forgive and enjoy other things, even if they make no sense. Back in the 90s, when we were looking for Saturdays to drown in digital fun, Donkey Kong aced it. Jumping on a swordfish and dodging murderous octopi while grabbing life-giving balloons felt good because the gameplay felt right.

Stories like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and plenty of others have gaping plot holes, leaps in logic, and events that would seem, if explored in isolation, ridiculous. But they don’t matter because the part we care about, the central tale, is executed so well. That idea extends beyond books to movies, games, and just about any sort of creative expression.

Get your central feature straight, and then you can do almost anything you want.

Sidenote: This post was prompted by a pick-up of the SNES Classic, a little version of the Super Nintendo that’s made its way into stores and is well worth a pick-up if you’re at all interested in a nostalgic tour of early 90s adventure.

Conquer the Galaxy – Star Wars Rebellion and a Board Game Feast

There are board games, just like there are stories, at every level of scale. Some put you in control of a single piece with one ability – often just being able to move in a direction. Others give you mountains of rules, pieces, and options and it’s up to you to parse what to do with them.

Star Wars: Rebellion sits on the latter end of that scale – you pick a side from the movie series and play against the other (Empire or Rebellion – no prequels here). Rebellion chases after that most compelling of goals: the asynchronous victory condition: the Rebels win by staying alive long enough to get sympathy from the galaxy, the Empire wins by destroying the rebel base.

This conflict plays out through all sorts of movements, missions, die rolls and recruiting. You have a galaxy spread out, on a board befitting it, and you’ll use most of its planets in every game. I’ve played most of mine as the Rebels and I’ve always felt, at first, like there are a thousand places to hide. By the end, I’m scattered to a few defunct systems hoping against hope that the Empire will send its fleet in the wrong direction and, thereby, allow me to win.

It’s rare, though, that victory by waiting out the clock feels satisfying. Think about it – if, in a novel or a movie, the protagonist sat around and the villains failed to find them, that isn’t in itself all that interesting. The protagonist doesn’t do anything in that scenario.

Now, twist it. Instead, the villains outnumber the hero and they’re running around, crafting traps and disappearing. Leading the villains in wrong directions. Harassing them without warning. Playing as the Rebels feels like being the kid in Home Alone – every chance you get, you’re trying to simultaneously slow the Empire down and run like hell. It’s a tense blast to play.

As the Empire, meanwhile, it can feel like there are dozens of insects to crush. The Rebels would be ground to dust if only you could catch them. Sometimes you manage Princess Leia to the dark side and she helps lead your fleets to the base and you detonate it with your Death Star, laughing at the elaborate Rebel defenses that have proved so useless.

On the other hand, perhaps you’ve sent your ships far and wide only to have the Rebels sneak behind you and sabotage your factories. Entice planets you thought were loyally yours to turn sides. Or even bait Darth Vader into a battle he can’t win and, when the Empire loses, strike Vader down permanently.

Rebellion, for better and for worse, is not a short game. These stories take time to tell. With experience, the average game would likely take 3 hours (including setup). Newer playthroughs are going to approach 4 or more as players get adjusted to all the parts. Still, it’s never boring. Combat, the worst part of the base game due to a lot of repetitive die rolls, is made much better with the Rogue One-inspired Rise of the Rebellion expansion.

Ultimately, what gets this game off the shelf more than anything else is the potential for unique moments. For those hilarious or crushing times, like a do-or-die attempt to blow up the Death Star that succeeds, or the capture of Luke Skywalker and subsequent corruption of the same. This game tells stories, and if you’re a Star Wars fan with a passion for the table-top side of life, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try.

Kubo and the Two Strings – The Folktale Made Visual

Every so often, usually when busied with some sort of mundane task, the wife and I will wander the vast labyrinths of video streaming services in search of some gem we’ve previously neglected. I’d seen Kubo and the Two Strings before, but Nicole hasn’t, and if there’s one thing that makes tedium easier to endure without sacrificing quality, it’s a movie you’ve seen and enjoyed.

Kubo revels in its personality. The animation style is stop-motion, but with a level of detail and a distinct Japanese style that separate it from more familiar fare. This, by itself, would be cause for curiosity, if not much else. Instead, the visual feast comes spiced with a story that makes for pleasant popcorn fare. We’re not talking Kafka levels of intrigue, here, but Kubo hits its emotional notes and throws its characters into a number of fun sequences. Giant skeletons, paper bird swarms, and sea monsters all make appearances.

What, I think, I like most about this movie is its ability to hold fast to its plot without asking questions, without adding in complications, and, most of all, without spoiling the entertainment on offer by taking a harder look at the brutality of the story. People die in this one, kids. Good guys, bad guys. Often in medieval ways.

Still, the carnage is earned. Unlike some children’s tales where the “evil” only plays at the name, in Kubo the designation is warranted. The people chasing after the titular kid won’t hesitate to slice him and all his friends up, or, if it’s easier, to corrupt him against everything his friends stand for. Point being – it’s good vs. evil and the evil earns its keep.

So yes, if you’re believing this movie looks too kid-friendly for you, don’t make the mistake. It’s a magical adventure and a visual treat. You won’t have to think too hard to enjoy it either, because Kubo doesn’t cloud its intentions in layers of obfuscating plot.

Which, I suppose, is a lesson – once you know what you want to do with your story, do that. Don’t get distracted. Don’t get fancy. Find your story and tell it.

Caravel Island – Avoiding the Sword – Part 2

There’s a certain image that comes up in “Fantasy” settings – usually some monstrous creature, a dragon, say, is facing off with a knight and his (or her) sword. A horse might be there too, for color.

After a couple of sessions of Caravel Island, what I’m finding is that the combat is actually the least interesting part of the game. I don’t think this is the result of “boring” systems (though, perhaps, there is too much emphasis on combat abilities in the classes and whatnot) but rather because the players have so rarely been in situations where “stab them” is the first thing that comes to mind.

From a story perspective, this has interesting implications for how characters would really react. For example, when confronted with the possibility of physical conflict, would the dashing rogue really draw the knife or shoot the pistol first, or would they do everything they could to talk their way out of a situation (or just run)?

As entertaining as grand battle sequences are, it’s often in the interest of all parties to avoid risking life and limb for non-essential fights. What I’ve been seeing is that this translates to the players and their characters too – if there’s not a compelling reason to attack something, they’re not going to do it. In fact, the only actual combat that’s taken place so far came when the players were more or less forced to fight by some creatures they unwittingly antagonized. As soon as the players were able to end the fight (without murdering everything), they searched for and found a way to do so.

I should note that this isn’t necessarily because they feared that they would lose said fight, but more because there appeared to be a way out of it without conflict. It’s a perspective that I haven’t considered as much in my own writing because, generally, the stories build towards these scenes of swinging swords and blasting rifles. Getting to that point and then not having a fight would seem odd. Right?

Now I’m not so sure. Thing was, watching the players find ways out of the fights was more interesting than the combat itself. The sheer ingenuity the players used to squeeze their way out of danger was fascinating to see – moreso than the by-the-numbers roll dice and stabby stab.

I’m going to play with this in my own fiction, just because having characters that employ all of their energies in avoiding fights would be fun to play with, provided that their only solution isn’t a panicked flight to anywhere. And, for the game, I’m going to put more energy into making sure every conflict has some potential means of resolution that doesn’t involve an ax to the skull.

 

The Delight of a Coffee Shop in a New City

A couple of weeks ago, as an airport on the way to a Vermont wedding, my wife and I spent a quick night in Boston. In the morning, while she jaunted off to a workout, I did the responsible thing and went hunting for scones and coffee. A bit of writing time wouldn’t hurt either.

In that historic downtown, with the various New England hordes finding their ways to work, I checked the old Maps app on the phone and fished around for somewhere interesting. There’s nothing particularly wrong about a Starbucks or a Panera (or, this being New England, a Dunkin’ Donuts), but I find the quirky and non-branded nature of more local haunts to be conducive to creativity. It’s as though the muse finds a kindred spirit in the handwritten specials and the home-cooked recipes. The bags of coffee coming from a variety of sources and all that.

Anyway, I found what I was looking for in the basement of a building at a “Thinking Cup” location (which is apparently a local brand) and pounded out some words while Nicole pounded out some miles. For a day that was going to be spent driving through the fall colors of Vermont and New Hampshire, it was a solid start.

Last weekend, we stopped overnight in La Crosse, WI, a town nestled into the bluffs of the Mississippi River. There to do some hiking, Nicole and I did our usual dodging of the hotel breakfast and went scouting for a quick but interesting joint to salve our morning stomachs. We found “Cabin Coffee” and its wild berry biscuits, a dessert that would do me in if I had regular access to it. We drank our coffee on saddles, because this place carried a western theme to it.

The point being, it’s fun to hunt for unusual cafes. Most are naturally disposed to sipping the steaming stuff and having discussions about who knows what. Or, you know, falling into universes of your own making and seeing what sort of magic you can make.

Also scones. They’re so good.

I may have a problem.

Caravel Island – On Playing a Game in a World You Create – Part 1

So, around a month ago and at the behest of a friend who’s been watching a lot of Harmonquest, I agreed to run a tabletop game for some of our local group. If you’ve never had the experience of being a GM/DM (game master, dungeon master – both interchangeable terms for the person in charge of keeping the game moving, knowing the rules, and so on), it’s quite a bit more than being the guy who happened to read the manual. Perhaps the most important part of such a role is that the GM is responsible for the story. 

You can buy modules – pre-built tales with encounters and such – for various settings, of course, but the moment-to-moment action occurring around the table has to be driven by you, the GM. This has so many parallels to creative writing that, really, you can almost think of one of these games as you sitting around a table with your characters and attempting to moderate their various levels of insanity.

In this post, though, I’m going to talk about how I arrived at a system for running the game. In other words, the laws that govern the setting and help the players accomplish their goals (or die trying).

First, a bit of description: Caravel Island is a fantasy setting, a world that I’ve fleshed out to a light degree (though I plan to dig deeper later), in which humanity, after generally ruling things for a number of centuries, has been ousted from power by a conglomeration of other species and magical beings. In the aftermath of humanity’s collapse, everything’s in flux, and the remnants of humanity’s forces are attempting a strategic retreat to a number of places. Including a large island that has, thus far, been left alone for mysterious reasons. It’s on a ship to that island, as prisoners, that the story begins.

For a novel, you could take that and just start typing away. For a game, though, there have to be some rules. Knowing the group of players, I didn’t want to take something so involved as D&D. While I like their setup, I thought it would be too much for the lighter level of questing we were looking to enjoy. I did not, for example, want to explain to someone who’d never tried a game like this before all of the various permutations of clerics. Why a halfling isn’t a great choice for a barbarian, and so on and so forth. I wanted something simpler. With a focus on story-telling and minimal, yet impactful, die rolls.

I’d also experimented with Fantasy Flight Game’s (FFG) Edge of the Empire Star Wars rule set, which strips a fair amount of complexity away in favor of what they called a “cinematic” story-telling system. Of course, most of their materials were based on a science fiction, heavily licensed setting.

So I tried to combine the two of them in creating this one. We’re using FFG’s dice and general form of encounters, skills, and other such things combined with a fantasy world. It all seemed ripe for disaster.

And yet, after the first session, I’m cautiously optimistic. My friends turned out to be savvy, heartless killers, but that they were able to do things well apart from what I anticipated and the whole thing held together is important. The best part of being a GM is seeing the players get immersed in the world and trying to keep up with them. It’s a kind of stressful high, with lots of laughter when people make decisions nobody, sometimes even themselves, see coming.

Without getting into the minutiae, the specifics of what I took and changed and created for Caravel Island wound up being heavily focused on combat/skill elements. I wanted to make skills accessible and relevant without making them obtuse or require lots of writing/erasing on scratch pads. As such, most are focused around arranging/rolling/rerolling dice rather than outside effects that have to be tracked and dealt with. In many ways, building these components felt like plotting out a novel. Getting to the core of what was necessary for the enjoyment and cutting away the fluff… then carefully adding back in that fluff that was important.

Anyway, if the opportunity arises for you to take on the role of a GM (though I’d strongly suggest giving these sorts of free-flowing games a try as a player first), you ought to give it a spin. It’s a unique experience, and one that really tests your ability to “pants” a story as your players invariably take your grand plans and ruin them.

I’ll be doing some more posts on various aspects of Caravel Island, including what does and doesn’t work, as the group continues their adventures. And if you have any questions on building one of these up yourself, feel free to drop me a line!